It only took five days to transform the raucous cheers into adamant jeers and the palm branches spread at his feet into hard cold iron, driven into the rough wood beneath his hand. As I said earlier in the week, people, especially crowds, are a fickle lot. One minute they will cheer you, the next you are fodder for the Roman’s favorite method of execution.
Most people, when they are crucified, have to be forcibly held in position to receive the spikes. There is no evidence Jesus resisted in the least. The moment passed almost anticlimactically, though eternity had waited for this moment in time since before forever.
He chose this path. Submission was his linchpin. He who spoke the universe into existence was now quiet except for a few focused statements. He takes care of his mother, the thief who ask for mercy, and at the decisive moment his humanity shines through as he cries out forsaken, momentarily lost.
I remember many years ago, during a procedure (for which I was awake) for a collapsed lung, they told me I had a seizure. For several minutes after the initial shock, I was lost. I had no context. I did not know who I was, where I was, or why I was there. Then, like the populating desktop of a newly booting computer, things started to come back.
I sometime wonder (but not for long out in the darkness of silence and dread) what it must have been like to be, at least for a moment, lost, deserted, alone when for all of the eternity before this moment there was constant communion between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In all existence, from everlasting to everlasting, this moment is unique. The Godhead was rent in ways we will never comprehend. Never before and never after, but at this moment of absolute centeredness, the nexus point of all history, there is a pause, a hiccup by God.
That is the definition of true love, to give your all for those who do not deserve the least of it, much less getting their first choice. He who knew none [sin], became all [sin], and nothing will ever be the same. No then, not now, not ever.
As we move into our final day of this year’s Lenten meditation, may grace and peace fill your day as you contemplate the meaning of life, with God as your cornerstone may your dead reckoning always being straight and true.
